We meet Fratel Enzo Bianchi in his monastery, Casa della Madia, near Ivrea. Old knowledge of our newspaper, with whom he has collaborated in past years, from the next issue, coming out on 3 July, a new column of spirituality focused on prayer entitled: “Cristiano who are you?”
Brother Enzo, why did you choose this title?
«I am convinced, and it is not just my thought, that at this moment there is a great fragility in the life of faith of many Christians. In his recent intervention at the Italian Episcopal Conference, Pope Leone asked the bishops to awaken faith in Jesus Christ as the only Savior and as the center of the Christian faith. We live in a time when Christians have rightly opened to the needs of the world, to dialogue and comparison with many earthly realities, but the risk is to have made faith in Jesus Christ weaker. That is, the centrality of the primacy of Christ that Christians must have, because our salvation depends on him and the singularity of our religion is he “.
In simple words what is prayer?
«Prayer has a different development from person to person. There is the prayer of the simple person, who is like the child’s prayer in his mother who asks for thanks and protection. It is a prayer that must be respected, but knowing that in life we grow and that this prayer is not enough for a mature life of faith. Prayer is not so much to ask God, as listening to his voice that manifests itself in the Word of God. Because it is from listening that faith is born and that we know the will of God by shaping our life according to the Gospel. Prayer is a long journey that leads the person to worship and praise God until the measure of contemplation, which is not only mystics because it is the ability to take on the gaze of God on people and things. In a word: when I know how to see another person or the events as God sees them. Here is the peak of prayer ».
What would a young man say?
«I say from experience, and not only theoretically, that the only thing you can ask a young man is to stop even ten minutes a day to read a few lines from the Gospel and ask himself if he finds something that speaks to his heart. That’s all. I do not say that this will automatically make him Christian, but at least he will put in him an emotional memory of Jesus who will remain forever. And that at the appropriate moment he will re -emerge forcefully, as a true light ».
What is the real disease that afflicts us today?
«I see two diseases that cross. The first is that of a world on the run that instead of fighting we indulge with our choices. The world is on the run because it is we who make him run. We live from morning to night at a maximum speed. The second is that this rapidity has not been there for some time to think, to stop us, to ask us, to deepen. The poet Fernando Pessoa said that it takes time because there is time. If we want to get out we have to organize our day before living it and put as a good time for what we really want to do. Otherwise it is he who eats us, making us become unrelated to ourselves ».
So what happens?
“It happens that I do not” live “more, it is as if we were in a balcony to look at the life that flows without being more the protagonists. And we arrive in the evening that we are tired, emptied, without anything to be shook to say that, yes!, There is a red thread in our life. Many elderly people tell me they have not lived. And they are sad, not because they have not had some success or money in their lives, but because they feel that the time for them has flown unnecessarily. It is an anthropological problem before Christian ».
Some advice why don’t this happen?
«We must accept having a small moment of solitude and silence every day. We lead lives that risk isolation by scanning loneliness, which is that good size that we choose to stay alone and silent. If the first few times we can hear anguish and loss, gradually you discover hidden energies, we buy a vision and intelligence ability of the things that escapes the routine. We understand, that is, better and in depth the ties we have and the relationships with loved ones. I see him here at the Madia: many people the first and second day in complete silence are bad and want to go home, he took almost from a panic crisis. But if they manage to resist then they don’t want to leave anymore ».
Many are discouraged because during prayer they distract themselves.
“There is an education for concentration in prayer, but we must not scare ourselves if it happens. The mind wanders in prayer, there may be distractions. It takes time to spend their strength. These distractions are sometimes species of monsters that are shaking within us and rise from our “infernal” regions, the inner ones. That is the time to immerse ourselves even more in ourselves to look at them in the face without scaring us to know how to win and order them ».
Often today we turn to psychologists …
“Real. By now there is a “psychologization” of the life of faith that is very dangerous. Even in the Church there is almost no more talk about the action of grace, which is then the Holy Spirit, and the use of psychology prevails. This also in the seminars, a phenomenon that has contributed to creating a real desert in the field of vocations today. But so Jesus Christ is no longer the doctor of our lives. I believe, however, that we must fight above all with the spiritual weapons against the ghosts that live there. Pope Leone said you have to be human before Christians. This humanity must be found within us to become Christians. This mixing between spirituality and human sciences is dangerous and can also be the cause of spiritual abuses in limit cases, because at a certain point it is no longer understood if one is the spiritual father or the psychologist ».
How is prayer with charity connected?
«My spiritual master always told me that prayer is like taking a step between the events of life and among the people who suffer. Taking that step leads me to take care of the other, to console him, to give him help. Prayer is orthopraxes, that is, it moves to action. It is not a sentimental momentum of a moment, but something that is decided of our being more intimate and that gives spiritual fruits visible outside ».
Another great theme is that of heart peace.
«Peace is the last fruit of the life of the spirit. To obtain it, the Holy Spirit must go down in our depths, where we keep reservations towards the enemy, where we still have our load of aggression. If this does not happen, there will always remain within us of the forms of resentment, of hidden hatreds, of will of domination. We also see him among us Christians. We think of the fratricidal war in Ukraine: it is terrible thinking that we are all brothers, baptized and part of the only body of Christ. John Paolo in the encyclical novo millennium inaccessi wrote that the Church and the religious communities must be witnesses of communion. That is, they must become schools of peace ».
How are personal and community prayer cordin?
«They are like the movement of the heart of diastole and systole. There can be no one without the other. By now I have 55 years of community prayer and I can testify that one supports the other. If I only had personal prayer without an outlet in the community, it is as if I miss the objectivity in which to express my faith. For this reason, the real hermits are very rare, those who live, that is, only personal prayer without the support of the community “.
Do you want to tell us an episode that has somehow inspired by your prayer?
«My life of prayer was born like this: when I was very young my mother every evening made me kneel on the bed, he told me the words of the prayer and made me repeat them. In this way he started to make me stammer with God and since then I have never been able to stop praying. As he taught me to eat with his mouth, so with the same mouth he taught me to pray. I believe that if the mothers did this with their children, they would make them a great gift ».
